The Genica MPTrip

By SKillBot July 18, 2000 2:14 PM

I'm actually listening to it now.?I've gone through quite a few personal cd players, and this is one of the first of its kind to hit the market.?From what I can tell, you can only buy it online at easybuy2000.com.?I chose priority shipping (since it was the same as normal shipping) and I got in 5 days (including the weekeng).?Not bad.?

And "not bad" is exactly how I would describe it.?It doesn't look too ugly or anything, and it's kinda cool how ghetto it is.?No brand name on it anywhere.?It just says "mp3" in big letters over its sunroof (so you know it really is playing a cd) and something about esp and stuff.?It's quite a bit nicer than the beat up car discman in my car with a $5 sticker still on it.?

As far as performance, it's (get ready to slap me) not bad.?The quality through headphones isn't quite what I get from my computer, and I have yet to try the line out in my car.?By the way, the ear bud headphones it came with are still in their container.?I'd suggest investing in some decent headphones.?

The documentation that comes with it doesn't give any really detailed guidelines on how to put together your cds.?It does say not to exceed 192 Kbit/s, and I was so impatient that I loaded up a cd with plenty of 256's.?They play, but they sound like ass.?I also had a 96k mp3 on there, and it wasn't worth listening to either.?I've heard that it supports CDRW (though not officially), and I have yet to try this out too.?I've also noticed a quirk.?All of my Meat Beat Manifesto mp3's are screwed up, even though they're pretty standard format.?I don't remember what I used to encode them...?maybe MMaker Jukebox.?And no VBR (variable bitrate) support, but that doesn't affect me too much.?

For everything else, it makes a nice cd player, it doesn't skip too much (I haven't gotten mp3's to skip at all yet), and the included AC adapter is the same size, polarity, and voltage as sony cd players.?It even charges NiCad batteries while it's plugged in.?It also claims to record 500 seconds of audio onto itslef if you plug in a mic (or just use the included headphones and scream into them :).?I haven't been curious enough to try it, but I've heard the quality is terrible.?

In all, I paid $123 for it, and I think it's a nice investment.

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RE: The Genica MPTrip   reply

Posted by Jack (jack@dtheatre.com) on July 18, 2000 2:55 PM

Genica = Generica

More stuff   reply

Posted by sKillBot (travis@pulley.org) on July 19, 2000 11:23 AM

I tryed it out in my car yesterday. It sounds great there. And even those MBM mp3's sounded the way they should. I guess it's something with the headphone out. And it's way too quiet on line out for headphones.

CD-RW   reply

Posted by sKillBot (travis@pulley.org) on July 21, 2000 8:46 PM

Well, I just went through my second cdrw experiment today. It supports iso9660 format CD-RW media just fine, but not the UDF versions. Still, rewritable media for mp3's. I'm as happy as a pig in... um... mud.